Tipper

http://www.getdeb.net/software/Rubyripper

I’ve done a bit of speaker building. I take it from your post that you’re not a novice builder. Are you thinking of designing a crossover from scratch? I’m rather fond of the KISS principle. There is a school of thought that you can get away with any old drivers if you take care with the crossover. I don’t agree, the quality of the drivers you use is very important if you want a build that’s a bit special in performance. Of course, the more drivers, the more complex the crossover and if using a mulitple driver array for say bass you've got timing problems to overcome not to mention differning impedances. I’ve copied below how I built my last enclosures which may give you some ideas. The Loudspeakers I want to make a point here, cabinets are something you use for display purposes’ enclosures are something designed to contain a function. I build enclosures My view of sealed box enclosures is the less they resonate the better they sound. If you can achieve zero resonance then in theory all you hear is the drivers and the ideal box just supports them and supplies a volume of air for the driver to work against. I had calculated that with the Scanspeak midrange and hi frequency driver replacement and the slightly stiffer than original Volt suspension surrounds roll replacement, a 4 litre increase in internal volume might improve the overall performance. I wanted to keep the exterior width dimensions, the reason being the speaker stands I built for these are designed to support the enclosure at the edges with a single central cross strut joining the two sides at the top. This design would seem to have the best chance of not transmitting any vibration into the stands because the support is at the point of highest material density. The sides, back baffle, top and bottom were all constructed using 12mm birch marine ply as the internal layer, then a 2mm layer of Dum Dum, then a sheet of bitumen roofers felt, another 2mm layer of Dum Dum and finally 18mm High Density flooring grade chipboard. Dum Dum has great damping properties and was originally used to seal and prevent panel vibration on Morris Minor Travelers, (Woodies or estates to our American readers) Each enclosure panel was made by gluing a 38mm x 6mm hardwood strip to the outer edges of the pre cut Birchwood ply panels making what could be described as an edged tray. A uniform layer of Dum Dum was achieved by laying strips in the tray and repeated use of a rolling pin to get a uniform coverage to the correct depth. Next the bitumen sheet was placed in the tray and the next layer of Dum Dum applied. The bitumen sheet might seem unnecessary but unlike the ply or chipboard, Dum Dum sticks to it and prevents it from pulling up when rolling it flat. Finally the Chipboard panel is laid on top, glued where the edges contact the hardwood strips and a row of hardwood dowels are driven in reamed holes around the edge of the panel. Basically what you end up with is sealed frame filled with Dum Dum. The bottom panel is slightly different being filled with a single layer of Dum Dum and a sheet of roofers lead. The sides, top and base were assembled using glue, more dowels and staggered decking screw in pilot drilled, countersunk holes. The whole assembly was kept square using an internal cross frame and clamps while the glue set. Next the rear baffle was rebated and hole cut. I cheated a bit here and having scraped out the Dum Dum filling to a depth of 10mm, cleaned the exposed surfaces to remove any Dum Dum traces; I filled the gap with wood filler. The hole was tapered by 5 degrees front to back and the internal hole edge sanded to a 5mm radius. Two rectangular plywood braces with a central cross strut, with rounded inside edges were fitted, one just above the bass driver and ABR, central strut going from left to right and the other between the midrange and tweeter going back to front. A central vertical brace was also fitted, running from back to front on the box base cut to exert slight pressure on the back of each driver magnet and support it at the six o‘clock position. These were screwed and doweled in position. I’ve had a salvaged badly stained and damaged solid beach worktop knocking around for a bit and I decided to use that for the front baffle, it’s 38mm thick and I just managed to get two 60mm X 34mm sections out of it. http://www.wickes.co.uk/Solid-Dark-B...op/invt/324593 Apparently a plumber has scorched the underside during fitting it, brought it back to supplier who then left it in the warehouse where it got run over by a forklift. I paid the warehouse man £30 to “liberate” it I had this machined for me, holes and rebates. The front edges were given a 25mm radius to help prevent edge diffraction, the holes tapered to 5 degrees At this point I fitted the ABR and bass driver to check that the magnets were indeed supported and touching the brace in the horizontal plane. After a bit of adjustment all seemed well and I got on with the interior. I glued and stapled 6mm vehicle under carpet felt to all the internal surfaces slightly overlapping in the corners. The section above the midrange driver brace was filled with loose rolled Monacor MDM3. In the midrange section I cut MDM3 panels and used a contact spray adhesive on the panle edges to glue them to the felt at the back and sides and for the front I cut an over sized hole so as not to obstruct the air movement directly behind the midrange driver and glued that in place. I then wedged rolls of MDM3 in the edges creating a soft sided box around the driver. I used glued eggcrate acoustic foam on the sides and base of the bass driver section and made similar MDM3 rolls as above for the edges leaving a fairly large open space for air to travel from the driver to the ABR. Finally the front baffle was glued, doweled and screwed in place and any slight overlap at the outside edges was sanded flush. The crossover is mounted in an aluminum box on the outside top rear of the enclosure. The crossover box is surrounded by 50mm X 12mm hardwood (I think its oak) and I made a cover in the same wood all salvaged from an broken dinning table someone threw out that I liberated from a skip a while ago. The crossover box and surround is the same width as the enclosure and the lid has a similar radius to the front baffle. The base of the crossover box arrangement has six 12 holes drilled through it and the top edge of the lid has the same to aid the flow of air across the crossover components. The WBT speaker terminals are mounted on the underside of the crossover box and cable entry into the enclosure is done by forcing the wires through a ferrule and then pulling the ferrule and cable together through a a set of pre drilled holes in the back baffle. This keeps the box airtight. I made my own internal cables using braided solid and multi-strand Cat 6 PTFE coated OFC copper; six opposite direction braid sets 50/50 solid and muti strand mix covered in heat shrink. The cables are soldered directly to the drive units using high silver content solder. All the internal cables are the same length 50 cm and have enough slack to rotate a driver 180 degrees. The tweeter and midrange are mounted on small rubber grommets set in a ring of Dum Dum and tightened with a torque driver so that the grommet deforms enough to hold the driver steady but not enough to transmit vibration to the front baffle; that’s the theory anyway. The Dum Dum squeezes around the outer edge of the driver face plate during the tightening process and gets trimmed off with a hobby knife. I clean the back off after assembling. The bass driver and ABR are also sealed to the baffles with Dum Dum but no grommets and done up tight. I achieve, approximately, the 4 litre increase in volume without major changes to the exterior dimensions, despite some extra internal bracing and felt. The enclosure is about 8cm deeper than it was and 10cm taller. Moving the crossovers to outside and the thicker baffles which pull the magnet further out have all added to the internal volume. The finished enclosures are 62cm x 32 x 42. Without the crossovers they weigh 82 kg each. Atm the enclosures are painted in black satin Plasticoat. I took my time building these. I fell in love with them when I first heard them some 30 years ago. They’ve outlasted a wife, a few lovers, countless moves, seen two kids grow up and my hair go grey I did try once to estimate what they would cost to buy and in materials alone the figures got scary They don’t look like much in the pictures above and they haven’t got any prettier. They sound awesome though. I couldn’t have kept these going over the years without the help and advice of David Lyth of Volt Loudspeakers, Wilmslow Audio for sourcing drivers, and my mate Steve for letting me use his garage and woodwork tools. If you’ve managed to read all this you may now understand why a wry smile spreads across my face when 12mm MDF cabinets covered in veneer are mentioned You may have problems finding Dum Dum. The automotive trade is where to enquire. I have tried building actives and while in theory active should always outperform a passive design, getting full frequency range at a bearable cost proved out of my reach.

I wasn’t aware that Winchester Cathedral had been turned into a recording studio. Well, well, fancy that. Learn something new every day Newbies are absolutely hysterical aren’t they? Almost as amusing as the “I know it all, I read a lot of audiophile porn” audiophiles When you’ve torn yourself away from the magazines and visited a few real studios please drop in a post saying you’re talking bollocks...just for the record and all that old chap if you don’t mind...thanks awfully. Anyway, stupid as I am, even I can see that slagging off Americans on a forum with a great many American contributors isn’t possibly the best interpretation of my favourite reading material titled, “How to make friends and influence people.” Course, being English an havin problems wiv my spelling an grammar anat dont help wiv gettin a grip on the suttel apspects of whats writ in the book.

?Mark Powell wrote; "There are no better speakers in the world at any price than big Tannoys, though others are probably equal. I would be most interested to know if you have heard them. They make Magicos sound like cheap toys (and yes, I have heard some of them). Tannoys are not used for sound reinforcement in concert halls, cathedrals, and the like for nothing. And by more studios than any other manufacturers anywhere." Hmm, I would disagree. Some Tannoys can sound good but “no better speakers in the world at any price” (?) Well it’s an interesting opinion “and by more studios than any other manufacturers anywhere” I would be very interested to read any data you have to back this up Mark. Non of the studios I’ve visited, or know about, use Tannoys. Anyway, perhaps this company might disagree with both of your statements. ?http://www.atcloudspeakers.co.uk/ Of course, my preference would be; http://www.voltloudspeakers.co.uk/ Then of course there are the studios that use active near-field monitors not to mention those studios that still prefer the BBC style monitors like Harbeths and Spendor derivatives.

To the best of my knowledge; “rip” copy the original content. It may well be possible to “convert” to another bit depth and/or sample rate, post rip, but you can only “rip” what’s on the media. Semantics (?) No, not really. The importance of the distinction should become apparent when one considers that whatever happens post rip is a separate process and to obtain a finished copy at say 24/96 from a 16/44.1 CD some further sampling process has taken place.

Awwwww, comon Chris, you know what I’m like and yep you did provide some great help at the other place I’m not in any way criticising your efforts here, as Linux geeks go you’re a positive pleasure to to read and follow (tipper ducks ) The thing is, I really want people to have a go at Linux for audio. It’s just so much more suitable for audio than the other two. So, yep, great BushPilot is up and running and well done for better than average geek standard instructions and full marks for effort. I’ve spent a few months now tinkering with various Linux distributions and that has meant a good deal of Linux forum trawling which in general has left me sobbing in frustration. Granted, I still don’t have much of a clue about Linux, but that wasn’t initially my objective and this is what seems often to get forgotten in many of these Linux audio problems. For the audio enthusiast the bottom line must surely be can I get better quality audio out of Linux than Windows and Mac without spending six months on various forums trying to find out how to make this or that combination work. The answer is simple; YES. I chose Voyage/mpd very early on and I didn’t even set it up by myself. I had a lot of hands on help by a guy that does this stuff for a living. Interestingly he did point out at the time that perhaps Voyage/mpd wasn’t the best config for a) how I wanted to serve my files and b) for the proposed building and experimentation with my music server. Basically Voyage/mpd is way to fussy regarding hardware and config and isn’t that flexible. I know a bit better now There are many different ways to experience Linux audio and I promise anyone who has followed the above, you can get it sorted in a couple of hours and not go anywhere near a forum provided you have a few basic computer skills and yes, these other options sound just as good as mpd anything imo. Mpd is great, don’t get me wrong but like a lot of audio related matters the purpose of mpd gets misunderstood and quite a few people venturing into Linux audio seem to be under the impression that mpd is a prerequisite for decent Linux audio; it isn’t. You don’t need it for a same machine client and server config for example. Linux has made huge strides over the past year or so in attempting to give the average computer user an operating system that is actually user friendly, much to the displeasure of some of the more erm, traditional Linux enthusiasts who it often seems want yer average computer halfwit to be excluded from the benefits. I suppose this “you need to learn Linux to use it” will fade as Linux develops and hopefully more people will give it a try. I mean, take me for example; I’m thick as a brick when it comes to source codes and C++ but I’ve got Linux running. Hello Whell. How are you doing mate?

I have to agree with Miska and One and a Half. I’ve watched this thread and been left banging my head on my keyboard. Firstly, I do not understand why anyone would want to use mpd unless they were using a separate client and server, that is what mpd is for. Mpd uses ALSA drivers, just the same as many other Linux distributions. The second is why on earth use Lubuntu. I’ve had a couple of goes with Lubuntu and it fails in so many areas I’m somewhat surprised its been made an official distribution. Hats off to Chris for perseverance but imo way better to have written in the first place “don’t bother with Lubuntu and mpd. There are far better alternatives”. To my ears at least Linux sounds noticably better than Mac or Windows, but threads like this do nothing to encourage people to find out for themselves. Currently running Puppy Linux/mpd/mpc on server. Fairly easy to set up. Ubuntu 11.04 and DeaDBeef on laptop 1. Very easy to set up. Windows XP Media Player Classic/reclock on laptop2. fairly easy to set up. Ubuntu 10.04 and XMBC on deasktop. Easy to set up.

Krisbee wrote; “?CA is not surprisingly rather Windows centric, and Linux info/threads somewhat scattered. We could do with trying to pull it togther for anyone one comes to CA.” I’ve mentioned this elsewhere and it met with a resounding lack of interest. Call me cynical, but a partial objective of Hi Fi forums is to generate interest in products that you have to buy, call it supporting the industry if you will. The majority of forums support and are contributed to by people in the trade, be it the small entrepreneur developing a music player to Dac and amp manufacturers. Having a section dedicated to Linux based music servers must seem to some like having a small coven in a corner of their church. It will be interesting to see what happens when Idolise finishes developing his Puppy Linux based, wizard driven, point and click installation. The dedicated Linux crowd wont want him because their knowledge wont be required and the audiophile Hi Fi industry based sections wont want him either because they cant make a profit out of something that is freely available for all. As I wrote, call me cynical

Phofman. I promise you, my tone is not meant to be at all offensive; I'm just not very good at disguising my opinions in well crafted sentences and have a natural tendency to call it as I see it ....Oh, did I mention I'm English as well It is very easy to mistake tone in the written word so I will attempt to moderate it without resorting to pomposity. Good for you Bush Pilot. I started many moths ago with the sole intention of getting better quality tunes from my Hi Fi. I seem to have gone from four computers with Windows operating systems to three Linux based and just my gaming machine left with Windows. I agree, it is interesting but extraordinarily frustrating at times.

It’s strange really. I tutor maths and physics and generally seem to be at odds with those who believe in the theory comes first and once you understand that then practical solutions will follow. In my experience it is far better to provide something that works and then encourage people to find out how. No matter, each to his own. I cant help get the impression that many here and on other audio forums just want the operating system to give best quality “bit perfect” audio and hadn’t really intended to sign up for a six month intensive Linux course so they could listen to some tunes. Of course, those who know their Linux sometimes see this as an opportunity to not only demonstrate their knowledge the great Microsoft unwashed but also use the opportunity to blackmail the poor audiophile into becoming a convert to the mysterious ways of Linux. It seems a bit like telling someone you wont show them which buttons to press on the CD player to make music come forth until they’ve taken a course in sampling theory. I digress. However, the questions I am interested in is why is there this seeming fixation with mpd? I agree that it is an excellent method of streaming from a headless server (this is as i understand it it’s primary purpose) but does it actually provide noticeably better audio than say a lightweight Linux distribution and a music player capable of bypassing the Linux audio layers and deal with ALSA drivers direct? It would seem to me that the advantages of mpd are dependant on your hardware configuration and not necessarily intrinsically better at giving correct bit depth and frequecy replay than a number of alternative Linux configurations. Anyone got any opinions on this?

Hi Chris. Good to see you here and even better that you seem to have forgiven me for my outburst at the other place I eventually got one of the real time kernels working in Lubuntu, despite my original frustration with Lubuntu in general; more me not knowing, rather than there being anything wrong with the operating system........no surprise there I’ll try to dig up exactly which kernel it was when I get the hard drive back. Anyway, the short version is I couldn’t detect any audible difference between using the real time kernel and the standard kernel. Following Dynobots excellent how to and accepting that he had heard a difference makes me wonder if real time features have been improved in more recent Lubuntu distributions (?) To be fair, I have been pretty much of the opinion that real time processing is probably only applicable to record and playback and not really relevant to audio replay only.

That’s great phofman So, being an enterprising linux newbie I think to myself, Oh, I’ll try that. ?"Therefore, to circumvent the mixer device, just re-define the "default" device in system-wide (/etc/asound.conf) or user-based (~/.asoundrc) or use the "hw:CARDNAME" or more flexible "plughw:CARDNAME" string.” stuff and see if I can circumnavigate the mixer device. So, I know where the terminal is and I try copying what might be commands into the terminal one at a time. Strange thing is, I get command not found, or various other responses from the terminal and not one leads me any closer to bypassing dmix, let alone gives me anything I can see where any of the commands above might be applicable. So, I’m really none the wiser and while you may know what you’re talking about, as a linux newbie, I still don’t have a clue. The point I'm trying to make here without upsetting anybody is this kind of post is great if you know a bit about Linux but if you're a virtually beginner it doesn't mean anything and certainly doesn't get anywhere near addressing the problem in the original post.

I also use,or have in the past Voyage/mpd in a music server (currently experimenting with Puppy Linux as the base) but I don't use the SOtM card finding that USB powered independently from the main computer (Linear regulated power supply feeding an ADUM chip) works rather well.

Lets try again phofman My name's is John and I'm sorry if I've come over a bit short tempered. I agree with much of what you've written and no, you've wrecked nothing hopefully. If you know your Linux, as it seems apparently you do you'll understand my frustration with the "just type this in the Terminal" that either forget a vital piece of information or just plain don't work. I imagine you like everyone else who has had to struggle through pages of Linux forums searching for a solution to a problem knows exactly what I'm talking about. I will say in defence of Pulse that there have been considerable improvements since 10.04LTS. It's almost friendly in 11.04 I would also agree that the chances of an error are a lot less using the Command Line Editor provided the instructions are complete. However, for a new user the CLI is pretty intimidating and there is some truth in my reservation that it may not be the ideal way to learn a bit about how Linux is structured. The omission of the Synaptic Package Manager in future releases for example is very short sighted imo. At least by using the SPM in combination with the Software Centre the new user can at least see what depends on what and get a moment to think about the wisdom of their actions before clicking Apply. My appologies again for appearing grumpier than normal.

Thank you esldude. I'm glad pleased you found the guide interesting As you write, it looks like an awfully long and complicated process but once you actually carry out the instructions it really doesn't take very long. The purpose was to write up a complete guide that would leave the reader with a working Linux OS, a bit perfect music player and a fully functional computer and as you mention, a full guide to installing and setting say up Windows7 and foobar would probably run into to pages. I hope there is enough information to encourage people to not only give it a try but to also make use of the tweaking advice and links.